Cloudberry Kingdom review – world’s hardest platformer

Another Kickstarter project makes it to completion, but despite modest goals and funds could this Xbox Live Arcade release be the best of the bunch?

We’re not sure what sort of person donates money to a Kickstarter promising to be ‘the hardest platformer ever’ but we hope they’re pleased with themselves. Actually we’re more surprised that they would see the need – considering the near endless supply of indie games like Super Meat Boy – or would actually trust Kickstarter to deliver. But for once it has, even if Cloudberry Kingdom doesn’t quite live up to its original billing.

If you don’t remember the hype for Cloudberry Kingdom’s Kickstarter campaign then don’t worry as neither do we. It completely passed us by at the time (last April according to the official page), but then all developer Pwnee Studios was asking for was a modest $20,000. A goal they only slightly exceeded with 640 backers providing $23,582 in funds. But that strikes us as a much more sensible use of Kickstarter then some of these other multi-million disasters-in-waiting.

Apart from its difficultly Cloudberry Kingdom has another major claim to fame in that it’s the first ever procedurally generated platformer. What this means is that there are no pre-made levels designed by Pawnee, but instead they’re automatically generated by the console depending on a number of variables (such as the theme of the current set of levels) and the way you play.

It was only recently, with Rogue Legacy, that we were commenting on how difficult this is to do, but Cloudberry Kingdom works impressively well – occasionally churning out stages so good you’d swear they’d been moulded by the hands of Miyamoto himself. At other times the results can be more mediocre, but they’re rarely ever broken and that is a major technical achievement.

Even so the system does have a number of unavoidable side effects, the first being that unless you’re superhumanly skilled the game itself automatically lowers the difficult and its claim to be the hardest platformer ever no longer really makes sense. In fact the difficultly level is perhaps the most unsatisfying element of the whole game, as it tends to peak and trough to no obvious pattern.

This should add an extra layer of unpredictability to the game but to be honest it’s usually anything but. The procedural generation does work but the stages it spits out follow an increasingly obvious set of rules that it become ever easier to predict. Running as fast as possible and just taking the obstacles as they come works nine times out of ten and there’s rarely much need to stop or figure out some complex strategy for your approach.

The more you play the more you begin to understand the way the game’s designers think, despite the fact they’re supposed to be more hands-off than usual. And yet this isn’t really a complaint, and unless you truly are a masochist neither is the wavering difficultly level.

The game’s stages are short enough that none stay around long enough to irritate. Not only that but their brevity increases the desire to see the next one, to the point where you’re repeating the immortal phrase ‘just one more go’ with alarming regularity.

You could argue that the game could’ve still done that with hand-made levels, and you’d probably be right, but the fact is the game is still enjoyable as it is. What it also is though is embarrassingly ugly. It looks like one of those indie Flash games you find on Kongregate, where the programmer had to do the graphics himself because there was nobody else around to ask.

Maybe that’s exactly what did happen, but even though the game’s not exactly expensive its production levels are pretty basic even for an Xbox Live Arcade game. Not that being ugly is an impediment to good game design but Cloudberry Kingdom lacks any kind of distinctive art design and its attempts to create a mascot via an aging superhero character are pretty pitiful.

There is wide range of other characters to play as though, with many having different abilities such as double-jumping or inverting gravity – which arguably adds more variety than the levels themselves do. There’s also a set of novelty play modes that add time limits and combos for those that want more to worry about than just falling off a collapsing platform.

There’s a lot about Cloudberry Kingdom that doesn’t quite work as intended and yet strangely we never felt very aggrieved about any of it. Cloudberry Kingdom proves that a fun game is a fun game, whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to or not.

In Short: Not everything works as promised but somehow that doesn’t really matter when the never-ending platform action remains as entertaining as this.

Pros: There’s a lot of clever technology beneath the game’s innocuous surface, with plenty of genuinely different characters and tight, precise controls.

Cons: The procedural generation is almost more trouble than it’s worth, especially with the predictability and wavering difficulty level. Ugly graphics and art design.